Today I took a photo of my kitchen, and then post-production'd a pink bezier line from my cooking pot to the trashbin. Deep stuff. What do you think of the imageblog format? I think it's nice in that it gives you something to look at (dur). I can then write about the image, or I can ignore it. Just a wall of text on a screen can seem daunting to readers. So, maybe I will continue with putting some kind of image on each entry; it also seems appropriate since I did get my degrees in VISUAL ART.
At my undergrad institution, they gave us two options: get a degree in visual art, or a degree in visual and performing art. They told me it basically made no difference, and I'm not even sure if there were qualification differences between the two degree titles. Possibly some minor thing, like a class or two. I think it was a way of addressing the "expanded field" qualities of contemporary art, as they are, such that they aren't restricted to creating objects with see-able properties; there's conceptual art, sound art, relational aesthetics, performance art, etc. Furthermore, even in practices like sculpture and painting in which the works are apprehended and consumed visually (for the most part), why should these kinds of works be reduced to images? Can't there be "more" to them, like the process of making them, their cultural import, etc? "visual art" seems to cheapen and reduce potential.
Part of the issue comes from attempting to marry art practice -- studio art, where art is created -- with an academic environment that already uses the term "art" (bachelor of arts, master of arts, arts and humanities, etc). So there needs to be some way of taking "actual art" and making it special and distinct from "the art of writing" or "the art of research", as it were. "visual art" seems to work ok in that respect, except when you encounter obvious lexical counterexamples like performance and sound work. So, what to call it all? Sensory perception art? Phenomenogical art? I suppose this all amounts to the same "definition of art" problem that is encountered over and over, and if we agree there's no solution it makes just as much sense as any other approach to call it all "visual art," even though it's not.
But this seems so obviously stupid. What if a degree program were called "creative endeavors"? That might be the most accurate, but in fact if MFA "visual arts" programs were called that, people might start to realize just how open-ended they are, and then perhaps question their validity and usefulness. Maybe there should be different programs for visual art, performing art, conceptual art, sound art, etc. Certainly there was a weird lack of material focus in my (and most others, I think) MFA program -- the party line went that students are expected to come into the program with materially sound practices, such that they require no further technical instruction. This is all well and good, but then that time that could have been spent on technical and material refinement is spent on reading theory and talking about art. Talking about art probably has more value than reading theory, at least for me. But I'm pretty slow with reading, so that's expected; I don't think it's a good idea to throw it all out or say "theory does not help practice", although I do think I see some consistent problems that come up when students make a conscious effort to force their work around a singular, textual concept, instead of allowing it to evolve naturaly as part of the creative process.
Just exactly what it was that I learned in two years of MFA isn't exactly clear to me, but I think that doesn't necessarily mean it was a worthless experience, or even an "ascholastic" experience. It must have done SOMETHING to my brain. Made it more artsy, maybe. Perhaps it just told me "yes, theses are irresolvable problems, but it's still important to keep thinking about them."
Soon I go out to wendy's, get grilled chicken sandwich.
Time passes...BUT WILL YOU?
Today's image will be a photograph of my apartment. Yesterday's entry started off as depressive ranting and "i hate everyone" type stuff, but I decided to delete it. Anyway, off I go to get my camera. Welp, nevermind that -- my battery seems to be unchargable. Before realizing this today I knew I sort of needed a new camera, actually, not that the use of my camera is much more than playtime entertainment -- photos have a discolored strip towards the top of the page.
In other news, my smoke alarm was emitting a loud CHIRP at approximately 10 minute intervals, until I couldn't stand it anymore and took out the battery. I guess I should get a new one, but to be honest I don't care that much. Also, I think an individual smoke detector in a bachelor (1 room) apartment is not that useful; if there's a fire in here, I'm going to "detect" it myself without the aid of some smoke sniffing device. Furthermore I'm pretty sure there are detectors in the hallway, if the issue is some building-wide fire. Next time I'm at the drugstore and remember, I'll pick up a new 9 volt.
But yeah...i have to take a picture with my ipod, I guess, since my camera is kaput. Lemme do that. Unfortunately, it appears my ipod was stolen. Nevermind, it was wedged between my bed and the wall. However, now I have to wait for it to charge before I can use it. I have a constant paranoia about things being stolen rather than my just losing them. From what I gather this is rather typical in crazy people. But I did have a couple of childhood friends who stole stuff from me as a matter of course, and so I think those neural pathways were activated at an early age.
I wonder how long it will take for my ipod to charge so I can take a picture. Yesterday's entry was just depressing, and I'll let it stand as a monument to such depression. My unstated goal this week was to do an imageblog, with seven entries, each of which beginning with some posted jpg, gif or png, so I guess I'll go and find something on my hard drive, as I did with the first entry on this page. Oh, nevermind...it's charged enough now.
According to the BMI charts, I should weigh an absolute maximum of 194 lbs. I stress ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM here: I could weigh as little as 144 lbs and still not be underweight. And, in fact, I have a friend who is either my height or a bit taller and weighs almost exactly that much. And yes, he looks quite skinny, although not unhealthily-so; he's just one of those people with visible veins in his abdomen. I wish I looked like that, actually. I've always been jealous of veins, ever since I was a little kid. I currently weigh about 310 lbs, which gives me a BMI of 39.8, which is right on the border between class II and class III obesity (with class III being the highest, or worst, class); it's in severe/morbid territory. If I were to weigh 234, which I did for many years while being reasonably happy with my weight (although I did consider myself a little bit "soft" or pudgy), I would be right at the lowest point of obesity -- still obese, or fat to the point where it impairs one's health.
Could I weigh 194? I don't know...probably not. What I do know, though, is that the social cost of obesity is starting to take a more serious toll on my psychological well-being: I'm reluctant to leave my apartment because I'm so ugly.
This subject bores me, in a way, just because I've been through it so many times already and have determined via experience that there really isn't a good solution. I've lost weight in the past (four main times, I think), but have always put it back on. I'm just programmed to eat myself to death.
I removed my scathing essay on the art world. An early form of it is still somewhere in this blog for those who want to dig for it and consider bloggish all-lower-case writing as something more than half-baked musings. In fact, I realized that it was mostly a "definition of art" category of assertion, and was maybe not that revolutionary. The only purpose it served was to alienate people. I tend to complain about how people -- specifically people I see as residing in the "exhibition-culture" of the contemporary art world -- conflate art and the art world, and devalue art objects that don't conform to some specific "art world" standards of culture. However, in writing off what "the art world" thinks I'm committing the same sin. So, it's best just to focus on art, and ignore people with narrow minds, wherever they may lurk.
I have an urge to make a new animation. What should it be about?
My camera suddenly decided to start working. I spend 90% of my time in my apartment in the same maybe 30 square feet.
In other news, I really like this TOOL song ("reflection," from their 2001 "lateralus" album):
It diverges from the usual toolish sound, especially in the heavy use of that flangy synth, and also with the tribal drumbeat and indian violin. It's sort of one long drone, and might not appeal to people who are into tune, but I've always liked tuneless droning stuff; when I was 8 I liked the sitar-heavy beatles songs as opposed to things like "when I'm 64". Sometimes I wonder if not liking super complex tunes and chord structure is the sign of a simple mind. Herp derp.
Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust kidding!!!!!! I was only kidding!!!!! KIDDING KSDAGJaslkgjals;kddgjs ;oasld
I would have liked to have made today's image-blog into a photo-recipe for the simplest chili ever, which I just made, but I neglected to take pics as I made it. Something for next time, I guess. So, I need to do some other kind of image for you. I wonder if my camera has enough battery power to take a pic. Nope. Better go charge it. So many failures -- I don't know if I can go on. I guess I'll make something in photoshop.
Teehee. When I was a little kid, I had a well-developed sense of "aesthetic morality," as I discussed in the last entry, but instead of having to do with politics it mostly consisted of a super-conservative anti-abstract ethos of "art has to look like something to be good" (which I suppose is political in nature). A lot of the world still feels that way, which is interesting considering that I met a great deal of resistance to the concept of "joe average" vs. the art world when I tried to discuss it, I think in part because the art world is sensitive about being called elitist by mainstream society, and sensitive about it's precarious and in fact quite small place in the massive whole of visual culture. I went into this in the essay I mention in yesterday's entry.
I'm not entirely pleased with the essay, and I sort of feel like it makes me into a primitive, closed-minded creature. But my goal with it wasn't to say "art is only art if it's pictures of bowls of fruit or grassy meadows," but to point out that this narrowness of concept exists in the art world itself.
The nice thing and the terrible thing about disciplines like art, where it's harder to find "right answers", is that the breadth of possible ideas increases. This is good for creativity, but can be bad for quality if it results in a lack of focus and ultimately effort.
To be honest I don't know the degree to which people in the art world -- people who went to school for art, have exhibition-related stuff on their CVs, who are immersed in museum/gallery culture -- are narrow-minded about their definitions of art. Maybe they don't really think about it, but instead just do their thing within their environment, which is a fine way to go about it: just make stuff you're happy with, and forget about the theory. It's possible a lot of these "problems" I see with art are phantoms of graduate school and an overly-intellectual mindset. Indeed, I've heard that art worlders who were never in the BFA/MFA environment represent a different, not as intellectual viewpoint (i guess obviously).
Maybe someday I'll make artwork again. I don't know, though. I sometimes think I'm in a weird in-between state when it comes to suitability for an art school education: smart enough for some theory to take root and confuse me, but not smart enough to really see a good way through it all. Some of this might be my damaged right brain and the resultant attempts of my analyitical mind to make sense out of something that inherently defies analysis. Maybe my problem is I actually take the theory seriously, and most people just sort of ignore it, or leave it up to art writers.
I think what I would need to do, art production-wise, is follow my own advice and set some standards for myself: operate with some bounded context, and increase the quality there. Get pracitce. Get better. Too much experimentation, as is what sometimes happens in graduate school, ends up giving the artist a sloppy body of work. In truth I never knew what the heck I was doing, art-wise: sound, video, interactive, drawing, print, sculpture, etc; I was all over the place. People said my best work was my sound and video, so maybe that's where I should reside. I think another part of "the problem" -- "the problem" being a feeling that all is not right with art -- is that I just don't do enough to really develop a studied, practiced, and refined body of work; instead I dabble in art, occasionally.
I feel like I need to delete yesterday's essay, or at least insert more caveats of "I'm not a shoe-thumping conservative."
I was reading about ai weiwei, the chinese artist who made #1 in "art review's" the power 100 list, which made me regret writing what I wrote the past two or three days even more. Maybe I'm just not a good enough artist. And, perhaps more seriousy, maybe I can't even appreciate good art. That might be a simpler answer to what's eating me than claiming some kind of power-based conspiracy of the art world to undermine any and all creative projects that aren't presented in exhibition space.
But no -- I do think I had a point. However part of the issue is that I'm just not a top-tier fine artist.
The morality of aesthetics: kierkegaard talked about it, and people try to address it with postmodern conceptualism. It might appear that artists are in a bad position, from the standpoint of progressive politics, because they're concerned with superficiality: things like (physical human) beauty and (skin) color, which can become so political so fast when they're folded into a context of sociology and culture studies. Talking about and considering the way things LOOK vs. the way things ARE, and conflating the two, is perhaps seen as something postmodern leftism struggles against. I'm not convinced there's a big difference, though, between the way things LOOK (or smell or sound or etc) and the way things ARE; treating everything as an illusion smacks of insanity, although I suppose it's a big component of buddhist philosophy, which I don't think is particularly insane. It might be, though.
I suspect that the embracing of conceptual art has these political origins: because it's wrong to concern one's self with surface meaning, because this amounts to the exercising of political power, a way out seems to focus on inner structure. Of course this is no escape, and the concern with inner structure yields political bugbears that are at least as fearsome. The difference is that appearance is THERE -- it's hard to argue that a shape is not of a particular size, color, or lit in a way that it is not. This sort of absolutism -- scientific absolutism, or "reality" as some call it -- is antithetical to postmodernism and its intersection with conceptual art. So a way out of this is to disregard physical aesthetics.
Postmodernism, though, can be independent of politics. Terry eagleton and others of his ilk are inclined to associate it with commodification, america, and the political/economic right, while still others -- most others, maybe -- associate it strictly with the left. Some people think postmodernism is a negative, bad thing, while others seem to regard it as neutral or even a good thing. I guess it's just a thing. I defined it in a years-old essay as something like the rejection of the authority of culturally-established, power-based language categories for a more detailed analysis, thusly likening it to science. Funnily, you often hear that postmodernism is antithetical to science, because it confounds the distinction between "this" and "that" -- it sees measurement or standards as oppressive and ultimately "inaccurate."
If one is going to talk about the morality of aesthetics, though, I think it's germane to mention not only the postmodern conceptualist rejection of the political aesthetic, but the humble, anti-classist, and perhaps protestant rejection of the garish and ornate as being ungodly or associated with money as the root of all evil; sometimes the avoidance of beauty can have these origins, in addition to or in lieu of the more postmodern engine.
There's an ongoing PROJECT of art theory, of text building on text that tries to better understand how art functions, in society and on its own. I have to make guesses at what's being said there, though, because for the most part I can't/won't read art theory. In fact, I can't/won't read in general -- I don't like to, beyond skimming paragraphs and one-liners on the web. This is a complex issue: it has to do with innate deficits like poor attention and visual tracking, but it also has a psychodynamic component in that I don't really like other people's ideas; evidence for the latter is in the fact that I re-read and edit my own writing. Still, mostly the former, though, I'd say.
I'm sure I'm not alone, and that there are others who can write but can't read. Blogwriting is a particular kind of writing, where you don't sweat sounding good or making sense or being cogent. It's useful. Essay writing is a lot harder.
I guess what I'm doing now is coming to terms with everything I learned in the past two years, in my own way, and trying to incorporate it into a cohesive world view. I think this is a useful project, if only for value-driven reasons (time/money spent on education should not be squandered).
It's funny, though, how everything ends up being a subset of culture studies, when perhaps it should instead be a subset of science. It's understandable -- most things have a component of "humans doing them". With this view, you can argue mathematics to be a subset of ethnomathematics, which was one of my thesis arguments. Perhaps neuroscience is the new way to understand everything. Is it too late to get into this field?
I don't think I can keep up the photo blog. I struggled to find something just now for several minutes before settling on marina sirtis, a.k.a. "counselor troi," of Star Trek fame, riding topless on an elephant. I wonder what she was thinking.
Oh, I took the entry I wrote in 0108.html on art, did extensive editing, and turned in into a permanent essay. So, I have a more legitimate excuse not to blog, at least as much, today: I was working on other writing.
I think I have only one reader: randy. Hi, randy.
But I sort of like to keep things that way, and not promote my blog at all. If I happen to attract some readers as I did several years ago then that would be fine, but there are certainly advantages to having a very limited audience. That might beg the question "why put anything on the web?", and indeed it's all very complicated: I don't want to be isolated and lonely, nor do I want to be overcrowded and stripped of privacy. If I had not been so nomadic in my website practices over the years, I'd almost certainly have a "significant" following of people. Once in 2002ish an essay I wrote was linked to by a well-known blog: lies.com. From them, I got something like 10,000 hits in one day. But the essay they linked to had some questionable content, and I removed it. Making these decisions (fame vs. Privacy or social saturation vs. Loneliness) is an ongoing struggle, for everyone.
I've got one hour to publish this. I'm thinking of making a late night trip to the convenience store and getting some fudz. 30 minutes now.
I said I was going to do a photo blog, so now I guess I have to do it. Also, welcome to a new page, faithful and genle reader! 0108.html was 7 entries long -- a week's worth. I used to go by the size of the browser's scroll handle when deciding when to start a new page, but I don't know now -- the scroll handle looks awfully big on all my previously posted pages. It makes me think I had been prematurely starting them.
This young woman was someone I used to talk to on AOL when I used it as an internet provider, and then on the AIM chat service with the same usernames. I met her around 1999, in a chatroom. She was from florida, and in high school at the time. We even talked on the phone once.
Then one day we stopped chatting; I don't remember why, or if it was an abrupt or gradual stoppage. But years later I tried messaging her again, and she was cold -- almost hostile. she clearly didn't want to talk, so I gave up on that. People are weird...who knows what species of bees get into their little flowered bonnets?
I have a long history of MEETING PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET. I met ana, a.k.a. Xgf6, through her personal website in 2004. At least it wasn't through a dating service -- I know people who tell others they met their partner at a bar, because it's too shameful and nerdy to admit they met them via online dating.
I've been on a few dates in this here town thanks or no thanks to okcupid, and none of them have been remarkable. I think this is in large part a function of dating not being a lot of fun. Perhaps a certain kind of person might enjoy dating (the more extroverted social type who likes to "see and be seen"), but it's sort of beyond me how that enjoyment might work. To me, a date is like a job interview; I don't find it unpleasant, exactly, but it's certainly not "fun." it might only be mildly interesting -- a way to break up the monotony of existence, not to be overly dramatic about it.
Certainly I've never met anyone I had any interest in pursuing on an online dating service. I think that's sort of the way they're set up: a gallery of humans in competition with each other at all times for the best potential partners; everyone's perceived erotic capital is driven down by the market flood, and people become really picky. Only the top 1% or whatever of good-looking, smart, interesting, etc, people are going to draw any interest, while the rest of them get mostly ignored. It's kind of like real life dating: a fraction of humanity is engaged in and manipulating the majority of sexual and romantic activity, while the hoi polloi sit at home and masturbate.
Speaking frankly, I'm way too ugly to attract girls I find attractive.
There are important differences between real life dating and computer dating. Principally, in real life one can enjoy chance one-on-one encounters, where there's not a flood of erotic capital driving everyone's value down. If you meet a girl in a bookstore and just the two of you are talking about some smart thing, she's going to seem a lot more attractive to you than if you saw her grinning okcupid photo next to a hundred other similarly grinning photos, and outshined by one or two grinning girls who are clearly better looking than the others.
I wrote about this somewhat in my okcupid profile. But other than that, my profile is a huge lie, mostly in that my pics are outdated and from when I was not so deformedly obese. I don't respond to any messages (i do get a few, or at least I did when I first re-profiled myself as a fake thin person) -- my profile is there only as a role playing game where I pretend I'm closer to the way I want to be, although I don't claim to earn $1M/week.
It's tough being ugly in this primate world; none of the other primates want much to do with you. Ook ook. I'm about halfway done, I'd say.